09/29/2026
Our beginnings is this. Granny Gold Meritt grew for the canneries around here. She passed on her passion to dad(Ralph King) now to me (Jesse King) growing tomatoes and Produce is in our blood.Thank you for allowing us to grow for you.
In the Ozarks, a summer job once paid by the bucket, just a few cents at a time.
The man at the top of that business was Roy Nelson, known as the Tomato King of the Ozarks.
By 1927, a Stone County booklet listed his company running 15 canneries.
His empire ran on rails. Railroads carried Ozarks tomatoes, strawberries, apples and peaches to distant markets. On the way back, they brought something rural families rarely saw: cash money.
In Stone County, the timing was perfect. Once the timber was cut off the land around Reeds Spring, people turned to growing tomatoes in the 1920s. Canneries followed, and so did jobs.
But here's what the "Tomato King" title leaves out: every tomato went through human hands.
Women peeled tomatoes and filled the cans. Men ran the heavy machinery and cooked the canned goods. Children weren't supposed to work there, but they often helped anyway, dropping cored and peeled tomatoes into their mothers' buckets.
Every bucket carried a station number, so everyone knew whose tomatoes had been peeled. Every full bucket meant a few more cents.
Some girls peeled all summer long just to buy new clothes for school.
Meanwhile, Nelson served as president of the Ozark Canners Association. Its leaders pushed for uniform quality, more efficient plants, and rules for labeling and insecticides.
The industry peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. World War II kept it going artificially. When the war ended, the canneries began to close.
The ones along the railroads held on longest. Crane, Galena, Reeds Spring and Branson all had canneries into the late 1950s or beyond.
The last canning factory in the area, in Reeds Spring, closed in 1968.
So the next time you open a can of tomatoes, think about the Ozarks kitchens and cannery lines where a summer's wages were counted one bucket at a time.
Did anyone in your family peel tomatoes in the canneries? We'd love to hear their stories.
Illustrated with the use of AI
